한국을 연구한 초기 개신교 ‘선교사 겸 학자’들

Abstract

Some protestant missionaries who arrived in Korea in the late nineteenth century had a great academic interest in Korea. They began to study language, culture and history of Korea and published the results, while they did their regular missionary work. They even established the Korea Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (RASKB) as the world’s first Korean studies organization in 1900. Since then, RASKB had been the center of Korean studies for about forty years, distributing its journal and interacting with dozens of learned societies. As a part of long-term research to find out personal and academic relationships of Western scholars of Korean studies, the author investigates lives and careers of these people called ‘missionary and scholar’. The word ‘missionary and scholar’ means a Christian missionary who studied language, culture and history of his/her mission field. Those who wrote one or two articles does not count, and the number of ‘missionary and scholar’ who studied and published for a relatively long time was small. Homer B. Hulbert, George H. Jones, James S. Gale, and Eli B. Landis started from a lay missionary to Korea’s first ‘missionary-scholar’ by publishing in The Korean Repository, monthly magazine started by the Korean Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1892. Although Landis died in April 1898 and The Korean Repository has not been published in 1899, three men kept studying Korea and established a new stage called RASKB for more people to participate in studying Korea.